The Winter of Unraveling

My father’s father, Elias, passed away on the tenth of February, 2015, when I was thirty-four. His brother, my uncle Thomas, had died on the ninth of February, 1994, before I was born. I suppose the true beginning of this tale is there, in the frostbitten air of that February, but the seed was planted much earlier, in the last week of December, 1989.

My grandmother, Margery, was a woman governed by rituals and signs. She would not allow a hat on a bed, nor would she break a mirror for any reason. But that year, something snapped within her. Perhaps it was the weight of a hundred small fears, or a fleeting desire to defy the patterns that had ruled her life. Whatever the cause, on the second of January, 1990, she stripped the house of every holiday ornament, every strand of tinsel, every candle and wreath. She boxed the nativity scene and the starry angel, and she dragged the boxes to the attic, muttering that the season was over and it was time for the ordinary.

My mother, Claire, thought it was a breakthrough, a rebellion against the shackles of superstition. But my father, Paul, was uneasy. He knew his mother’s mind was a labyrinth of omens, and this sudden departure from tradition felt like a snapped thread in a much larger tapestry.

On the morning of February the ninth, the police arrived at my grandparents’ cottage. My uncle Thomas had been driving home from a late shift at the mill when his car veered off the icy road and struck a tree. He died at the scene. Margery’s grief was a thing of terrible silence, but she found her voice in blame. She was convinced that her premature dismantling of the Christmas decorations had somehow invited death into their home. She whispered it to my mother, to my father, to the walls. ‘I pulled the lights down before the Feast of the Epiphany,’ she’d say, her eyes wild. ‘I broke the season, and now the season has broken us.’

Years passed, and the family grew, but Margery’s guilt festered like a splinter. Thomas’s death became a ghost that lingered in every conversation, every holiday. My grandfather Elias bore his own grief quietly, but he carried a different worry. He began to notice that every January, the house felt colder, the shadows longer. He confided in my father that he thought the house itself was mourning, that the very walls had absorbed Margery’s sorrow and were now weeping it back in the form of strange drafts and creaking floorboards.

After Elias’s own health began to fail, he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of dementia. In his lucid moments, he would plead with my father to ‘undo it’, to find a way to put the decorations back up and turn the clock. But the decorations were long gone, thrown out years ago. Margery had burned them in a great bonfire one winter, hoping to cleanse the house of her sin.

The year Elias died, I was thirty-four and living in a different city, but I returned for the funeral. My father asked me to stay with Margery for a while, as she was failing. I agreed, though I dreaded it.

Her cottage was a museum of grief. Every surface was covered in photographs of Thomas, and the air was thick with the smell of dust and mothballs. The first night I was there, I woke to a sound like hundreds of leaves skittering across the roof. I went to the window and saw that the garden was covered in a fine layer of frost, despite it being only September. On the windowsill, there was a single, shriveled holly berry, as if left as a sign.

The next morning, Margery spoke to me with an eerie calm. She told me that the house was ‘stuck in the season of taking down’. She described how every year, on the night of January 2nd, she would wake to find that the furniture had been rearranged, as if an invisible hand was stripping the house again. She would find tinsel in the fireplace, a bauble in the sink, a string of lights coiled like a serpent in the bathtub. She said she had tried to embrace the superstitions again, but it was too late. The house had learned her fear.

Determined to break the cycle, I searched the attic and found an old, battered box. Inside were a few remnants of that Christmas of ’89: a ceramic angel missing a wing, a strand of colored lights with frayed wires, and a crumpled paper star. I decided to place these items back in the living room, hoping that by restoring some fragment of the holiday, I could soothe whatever was haunting the house.

That night, I arranged the angel on the mantel, draped the lights over the window, and hung the star from the ceiling. As I stepped back, I felt a cold draft, and the star began to spin slowly, though there was no breeze. I called out to my grandmother, but she was in her room, murmuring to herself.

I went to bed, but I could not sleep. Around 2 AM, I heard a crash from downstairs. I rushed down to find the living room in disarray. The angel was shattered on the floor, the lights were torn from the window, and the star had been crumpled into a ball. On the wall, scrawled in what looked like ash, were the words: ‘You cannot put it back.’

I stood frozen. The house seemed to breathe around me, and I realized that this was not about my grandmother’s superstitions. This was something older, something that had been waiting in the space between the taken-down decorations and the grief. The very act of removing the symbols of light had opened a door, and now that door was jammed shut with the bones of the dead.

I ran to Margery’s room. She was sitting up in bed, a faint smile on her face. ‘He’s here,’ she said. ‘Thomas. He’s been trying to get back in, but the house won’t let him.’ She pointed to the window. There, pressed against the glass, was a face—pale, with hollow eyes, and features that echoed my uncle’s photographs.

I screamed and threw open the window, but the face was gone. The cold air rushed in, and I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I spun around, and there was nothing. But the room was colder, and I could hear a faint, rhythmic tapping, like a branch against the glass, except there was no tree near the window.

I fled the room, and as I ran down the hall, I saw that the walls were covered in frost, despite the heating. The taps at every doorway, the curtains were drawn tight, and the photographs of Thomas were all turned face down.

The next morning, my grandmother was dead. She had passed in her sleep, but her expression was one of terror, not peace. The doctor said it was heart failure, but I knew better. I left that house and never returned.

But sometimes, in the brief weeks after the new year, when people take down their own decorations, I feel a pull, a whisper of that frozen January. And I remember that my grandfather and uncle both died on the same day, February the ninth, but fourteen years apart. And I have since learned that Margery’s mother died on that same date in 1965, and her father in 1943.

Now, I count the days until winter’s end, and I am careful to keep my own decorations up until the very last moment. But every year, I find a single, shriveled holly berry on my doorstep, and I wonder if the pattern is in my blood, waiting to rip the season of light from my hands.